AID WORKERS, taking advantage of peace moves by rival factions in Liberia, have discovered hundreds of starving children, women and elderly people trapped in the western town of Tubmanburg.
UN officials said that on Saturday an assessment team from aid agencies had finally reached the town, which had been cut off by faction fighting and associated insecurity since February, and had started distributing food and medicine.
"The children have swollen bellies, their eyes are swollen, their skin is cracked and in some cases the flesh on the feet has fallen off," a World Food Programme official said.
"Hundreds of children are merely barely living skeletons," a UN statement issued in the capital, Monrovia, said after the Tubmanburg visit, adding that many appeared near death and lacked basic foods, medicine and safe drinking water.
"Virtually all of the children and elderly are suffering from some degree of malnutrition - one medical doctor estimated that 60 per cent of the children are severely malnourished."
The UN quoted reports from local people suggesting an average of 15 were dying every day in the area around the town. The assessment team left with 10 critically ill women and children.
Mr Alhaji Kromah, a faction leader whose supporters were one of the groups fighting around Tubmanburg, handed over heavy weapons to West African peace keepers in his northwestern stronghold of Voinjama near the border with Guinea.
Fighting round Tubmanburg pitted Mr Kromah's ULIMO K faction against one time allies in Mr Roosevelt Johnson's ethnic Krahn ULIMO J faction. The two groups signed a peace pact on Friday.
That and Mr Kromah's handover of weapons on Saturday were the latest in a series of moves agreed by Liberia's faction leaders under pressure from West African leaders to end more than six years of civil war and disarm the estimated 60,000 fighters.
Mr Charles Taylor, who launched the war in 1989 and commands the largest force, has promised to start disarming his men this month, when he expects to demobilise about 3,000.
The war has killed well over 150,000 people in Liberia, which was founded by freed American slaves in 1847.
Mr Taylor and Mr Kromah are vice chairmen on the transitional ruling State Council and their men fought together during clashes that killed hundreds in Monrovia in April and May.
Their opponents were Mr Johnson and an alliance from the Krahn ethnic group, which broke the stranglehold on power of the freed slaves' descendants and ruled Liberia during the 1980s. The fighting unleashed an orgy of looting on the capital.
West African leaders, frustrated by the collapse of more than a dozen peace deals, rallied Liberia's faction leaders round a revamped agreement in August and threatened individual sanctions against any leader derailing the accord. It envisages disarmament by January and elections by May.